I called in sick to work yesterday. I had to, it was a moral imperative. If I wasn’t at the front of the line at the local Apple store, I wouldn’t have gotten my iPhone. Everyone needs an iPhone. $499 and a new 2-year AT&T contract are absolutely worth it. How else could I talk on the phone to all my web-developer friends and listen to the latest Weezer album with a single pair of ear buds? I couldn’t, that’s why the iPhone is revolutionary. Steve Jobs told me, and he’s really smart so it must be true.
Mark my words; in a month or two, the world will recognize the brilliance of us early adopters. Then everybody will buy an iPhone and a MacBook Pro so they can be like me.
The only people who won’t have iPhones are rednecks. But they don’t count as real people anyway. They shop at Wal-Mart, and you can’t get accessories for living the iLife at Wal-Mart.
Some people are saying it’s smarter to wait for all the bugs to be worked out. Those people are idiots. All the smart sophisticated people will have one. If you buy one, you can be smart and sophisticated too.
Incoming freshmen at the University of Kansas will pay the same tuition for four years under a plan the Kansas Board of Regents approved Thursday.
If only we’d had this 6 years ago when I was a freshman.
If there is anything worse than being priced out of an education, it’s being priced of of your state’s public university for which your family has been paying taxes their entire lives. If there is anything worse than that, it’s being priced out halfway through your junior year after already investing thousands of hours and dollars into a degree because your tuition billed more than doubled in your short time on campus.
Every year of my college experience was significantly more expensive than the previous. By the time I was a senior I was paying double what it cost as a freshman. Double. It’s why money was so tight, it’s why I didn’t quit my campus job 18 months earlier than I did. It’s why I was stuck at work on Friday afternoons in May while everybody else was enjoying a beer at The Crossing.
At least it’s here now, and it will help some kids.
By what criteria you ask? I think you become old when the current crop of youngsters has a notably different childhood experience than you.
Exhibit A: That cool sidewalk fountain in the center of Old Town Square here in Wichita. It’s one of those that has a dozen nozzles that shoot water in the air, then the little kids run around and get wet. We never had cool stuff like that 10-15 years ago. If you want to get wet, you either rode your bike to the overcrowded community pool or jumped in the creek and braved the snapping turtles.
Exhbit B: Teens are plugged in, but are they disconnected?. Apparently we’re not just giving kids cell phones so their parents can find them. They’re getting them so they can send 857,000 text messages a day, and never miss out on what Jenny said that Scotty said about Britney to Josephine at lunch. OMG LOL! It’s not the gossip that gets me, (well it does, but I’m choosing not to care right now) it’s the ease and speed at which it flows.
It takes me a few moments to formulate a coherent thought, even more time if I want to put that thought out for consumption and without being embarrassed. Put on the spot, I can B.S. and fill, but that’s all it is, B.S. To reduce human interaction to a series of contractions and acronyms leaves little room for substance. Exactly how deep a conversation can you have if you can’t even be bothered to use vowels?
More than 100 years ago that Mark Twain said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And at that point all we had was the newspaper and the pony express. I hate to think what the race would look like today.
In what has got to be the oddest transaction in my history as a consumer, we learn that: Haircut = -(Book of Mormon)
At midnight on Friday I let a coworker give me haircut in exchange for letting him give me a book of Mormon.
Considering my weekend plans, it was pretty risky to let an untrained layman near me with a pair of scissors. However, it worked out well and nobody tried to sell me “product”, just save my soul, which was an unexpectedly less awkward conversation.
The remaining weekend was terrific, so I feel like I’m playing with house money at this point. Awesome.
I don’t know how I missed it, but the pride of Wamego (aside from me of course,) Travis Metcalf, was called up to play for the Texas Rangers earlier this season. He’s even hit a home run, awesome.
I know a Major League baseball player, not real well, but we had classes together and that counts right? I helped a big leaguer with trigonometry. If I can’t be one, this is the next best thing right? I think I’m going to audition to be part of his entourage.
Katie has got me thinking about some things that I want and need to do.
Admittedly I’m cribbing some of her list, but as my favorite writer said, “Good writers borrow from other writers, great writers steal from them outright.”
The discoveries of Galileo is running this weekend at the Lake Afton Observatory. The observatory is just down the road from my house, I really should go.
I ought to take a real vacation, not an extend weekend or a couple of days off. I should take at least a full week and go someplace.
I need groceries, man can only subsist on bagels and frozen hamburger for so long.
I wish I would write more off-site. Ever since I started training the newbie and trying to cram 11 hours of work into an 8-hour day, I’ve been too intellectually drained to be creative. It’s a downer and I don’t like it.
I need to fix my damn weed whacker. It’s only 9 months old and shouldn’t be going on the fritz like this.
The Braves haven’t won more than 2 games in a row in a month, but remain only 1.5 games out of 1st place. It’s a matter of time before the young guns get cracking, so I want the Mets to keep sucking.
I want to update/add a 100 things section to the site. I haven’t touched the old one since I was a sophomore in college. But quite frankly, I don’t think I’m as interesting as I once was.
I want to buy an electric guitar. I’ve never played one but it seems like fun. I’m getting better at the acoustic and would like to branch out. I’m thinking about a used Fender HSS Stratocaster (Hecho en Mexico) but they’re still at least 250 bones on eBay.
Because what takes me 3 minutes to do in my head, takes me 15 minutes to explain to someone else, who will promptly forget and ask again tomorrow.
So instead of just doing what I do. I’ll say what I’m going to do, explain why I’m going to do, demonstrate while I do it, summarize what I’ve done, explain why I’ve done it, and recap what we all do with a wide-angle lens.
This is now my life for the next 2 months, huzzah!
We’ve got a new guy starting on 2nd shift this week, and of course, I’m training him. He’s a new graduate from KU, but he’s originally from Venezuela and spent 5 years in college. So I put it at about 6:5 that I’ll be younger than my newbie…again. On top of that, we’re getting another new guy in July, and I know that he’s older than me.
This all leads to the distinct and odd possibility that since I was hired, we will have had 5 new college grads enter the group, and every single one will be older than me. Is that cool or just sad?
Update 6/14: Yep, 9 months older than me. I’m the baby for the forseeable future.
